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I think the big and frankly unmentioned part of the phenomenon is that we in the WEIRD west have long been accustomed to defining ourselves and choosing our lifestyles and interests accordingly. If you’d been born in almost any other era and any other set of countries, your life would have been largely predetermined before you could walk or talk. There were exceptions, but for the majority, what you were was handed to you, and in some cases still is. You practice your ancestral religion, you worked at whatever it was your parents and grandparents did. Your ability to go to school was determined by social class. Your roles and expectations were largely defined fairly rigidly full of expectations for the roles you were born into. Religious rules. Gender roles. Job roles.
Fast forward to today and we really don’t have any of those things. You can become anything you darn well please. The son of a welder can become an artist, or a doctor, or an actor. You can freely choose your religion or lack thereof. You can dress any way you like. You can take on or abandon social roles with little regard for what other people think. Gender is really the final frontier of this process. It’s the only reality of yourself you don’t get to decide on. Everything else, religion, job, hobbies, clothing styles, education, etc. can all be bent to the whim of the individual. So why wouldn’t gender be something a culture like ours would try to negate with medical science? Why wouldn’t a society that treats every other identity as if they’re fashion accessories not try to make gender and sex into yet another consumer choice?
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